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The Best House in Paris

The glass-block facade of the Maison de Verre, which has attained cult status in the last decades. (From La Maison de Verre published by Thames & Hudson.)Credit
François Halard

PARIS

NO house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.

Its status as a cult object was enhanced by the house’s relative inaccessibility. For decades it was seen only by a handful of scholars and by patients of a gynecologist whose offices took up the first floor. Later it was mostly used as occasional guest quarters for friends of the doctor’s family, who had long since settled into a traditional 18th-century apartment across the courtyard.

So when I heard over dinner here with some friends a year or so ago that the family had sold the house to an American entrepreneur, I was astonished. My dinner companion, an architect who had never met the new owner, lamented the sale as evidence of France’s cultural decline, akin to the construction of Euro Disney. Waving a dismissive hand, she invoked the cliché of the ugly American, pockets stuffed with dollars.

As it turns out, although the buyer, Robert Rubin, made his money on Wall Street, he is far from a crass trophy hunter. After buying the house, he embarked on a painstaking renovation of its intricate — and for its time, ingenious — mechanical systems. He enlisted a corps of architectural historians and graduate students to decipher its secrets. With the first phase of the renovation completed, he plans to open it up eventually for limited tours. In his loving devotion to the house and its historical particulars, he has emerged as a role model for those who seek to preserve an architectural relic without turning it into a mausoleum.

Mr. Rubin, 54, is a born collector. He restored his first car, a Jensen Healy, when he moved to New York City in his early 20s. After racking up money as a commodities trader in the mid-1970s, he turned his eye to bigger prizes, like a 1960s Ferrari 275 GTB and later a rare 1933 Bugatti that had once belonged to King Leopold of Belgium. His fascination with industrial objects eventually led him to the works of Modernist architects like Jean Prouvé and Chareau, whose creations were elaborate Machine Age fantasies.

Approaching his new subject with the zeal of a scholar, Mr. Rubin went back to school in 2001, enrolling at Columbia University’s graduate school of architecture at the age of 48. He worked as a teaching assistant for Kenneth Frampton, the architectural historian who wrote a celebrated textbook on 20th-century Modernism.

Around the same time Mr. Rubin bought Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, a prefabricated metal shelter conceived in the late 1940s as a prototype for affordable housing in colonial Africa and later erected in the Congo. After a methodical restoration, he organized a series of exhibitions on the Prouvé house, shipping it to Yale and to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Last year he donated it to the Pompidou Center. (By contrast the hotelier André Balazs recently bought a version of the Maison Tropicale at Christie’s, for $5 million and plans to make it the centerpiece of a Caribbean resort.)

Yet nothing Mr. Rubin had collected up to this point could compare — in scale or in the weight of responsibility — to the Maison de Verre. The house is often compared to another early-20th-century masterpiece, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Both houses were built in the brief period between the two world wars, the high point of classical Modernism. Both embody that movement’s obsession with hygiene, and the fiercely held notion that a house could function as a tool for physical and psychic healing. But while Le Corbusier’s masterpiece was intended as the expression of a broad vision — a philosophical rejoinder to the squalid disorder of the medieval city — Chareau’s ambitions were more humble.

Born in 1883, he began his career as a draftsman for a traditional English furniture maker in Paris. By the early 1920s he had designed the interiors of some elegantly appointed apartments for wealthy clients and was mostly admired for his furniture designs, elaborate wood and metal pieces with movable parts that reflect a taste for refined machinery.

The Maison de Verre itself has been described as an elaborate piece of furniture. It was commissioned in the late 1920s by Dr. Jean Dalsace and his wife, Annie, who had bought the site, an existing 18th-century hôtel particulier, but were unable to evict the woman who lived on the top floor. As a result Chareau was obliged to carve out his creation underneath her apartment. Viewed from just inside the courtyard the house looks like a glowing translucent box, its great glass-block facade embedded in the 18th-century fabric and capped by the old one-story apartment level above.

The house’s poetic force has resonated through decades. Chareau conceived its interior as a delicate composition of interlocking forms, with the two-story private quarters seeming to float atop the doctor’s office on the first floor. Upon entering, you can either descend a few steps into the doctor’s waiting room or turn back and climb a broad staircase. From there you turn again before stepping up into the double-height grand salon of the private quarters, which is illuminated through the towering glass block wall.

The series of turns is a shrewd strategy. With each step the old Paris — the world of medieval squares and 19th-century boulevards — grows more distant, allowing you to become enveloped in Chareau’s fantasy. A towering metal bookcase of small richly bound volumes stands along the salon’s back wall. Stairs lead to a narrow balcony that frames two sides of the salon and continues on to the bedrooms. The only views of the outside world are at the back of the house, which overlooks a small private garden.

The house has been compared to a Surrealist artwork, a theater stage and an operating room. That effect is animated by the play of light. During the day the facade has a strange milky glow; at night floodlights illuminate the wall from the outdoors, so that it glows like a lantern, bathing the salon in amber light. A single-story dining room and a smaller salon are set just off this central space, so that you are always conscious of its dramatic scale.

But the house is above all an exquisite machine. Chareau worked closely with Louis Dalbet, a talented ironworker, and the house’s detailing has as much in common with centuries-old craft traditions as with the efficiency of the 20th-century assembly line. Big curved perforated metal screens at the bottom of the entry stair rotate to shut the apartment off from the office below. A rolling ladder set along the salon bookcase is fabricated from a single piece of steel pipe and inlayed with wood. The glistening brass window casements at the back of the house are assembled from the window panels of a passenger train.

The Maison de Verre had a profound impact on generations of architects who were seeking to free themselves from the rigid orthodoxies of mainstream Modernism. Richard Rogers, a designer with Renzo Piano of the 1976 Pompidou Center, with its exposed tubes and bright colors, was captivated by the house when he first saw it in the early 1960s. A quarter-century later architects like Ben van Berkel would visit to try to decipher the uncannily fluid relationship between the house’s spaces for work and play, for public and private life.

The house stayed in the Dalsace family for more than 70 years. In the 1980s Dr. Dalsace’s daughter, Aline Vellay, and her husband considered selling it to the French government. Their thought was that it might be turned into a national landmark, as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye was decades ago. But the government did not take them up on it.

Mr. Rubin and his wife, Stéphane, approached the family in 2004 at the suggestion of a mutual friend and bought it for an undisclosed price in 2006.

Photo

The Maison de Verres
grand salon,
where receptions took
place, included an
Erard piano.Credit
Mark Lyon

“I think they finally sold it to me because of what I had done with the Maison Tropicale,” he told me recently in an interview in his apartment on Central Park West. “It was a very heavy responsibility to have.”

Although he loved the house, he added, “I didn’t want to fetishize it.”

The notion of owning a Modernist landmark has been fashionable for decades now. The usual impulse was to embark on a multimillion-dollar top-to-bottom renovation, then move into an immaculate architectural gem, upgraded with a SubZero refrigerator and a Viking stove.

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The problem with this template is that something always gets lost: the essential character, the gently worn eccentricities, the patina that accumulates over time. French preservationists call this unrenovated state “dans son jus” — literally, “in its juice.” When it is erased wholesale, the result can be sterile and artificial, like radical cosmetic surgery.

To avoid that possibility Mr. Rubin approached his task deliberately. He began by slowly restoring the house’s mechanical systems, first the electrical wiring, and then the original heating and plumbing systems. The outdoor spotlights, most of which had been lowered or taken down decades ago, were restored to their original position on a steel frame in the courtyard. He also bought a fancy new stove.

But he left many of the most visible scars untouched: the worn textiles and dulled metal surfaces as well as some of the structural alterations made over the years. He decided not to polish the perforated panels in the salon. The old rubber flooring, whose pattern of small disks looks cracked and worn down in some places, is still there.

“The whole question of originality and restoration always bugged me,” Mr. Rubin said. “It started with cars. My Bugatti was originally a Grand Prix car, and then Bugatti painted the car black. But the exhaust had blown some of it off, and you could see original blue factory paint underneath. I kept that. I thought if you restore it, you lose its soul. You need to feel some direct connection to the past.”

I recently had the chance to test this idea firsthand. For a few days this summer Mr. Rubin let me stay there with my girlfriend. The visit fulfilled a fantasy, but it was also a concession to various editors who have suggested that I briefly live in a house and then write about it. (Usually this suggestion arises from one of the tiredest clichés in architecture: that the more unorthodox a house is, the more difficult it is to live in.)

We arrived at the house in the late morning after a long flight from New York. A housekeeper greeted us at the door and methodically took us through the rooms. Light switches. Check. Bathrooms. Check. Where to hang our clothing. Check.

As we strode through the house, I was reminded of an essay by Mr. Frampton that compared the house to Marcel Duchamp’s 1923 “Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”). Like Duchamp’s work, he wrote, the house is separated into male and female zones, with the downstairs office offset by the bedrooms upstairs. These worlds leak into each other at carefully controlled points. A narrow retractable ship’s stair links the female realm to the main floor; a hidden stairway leads from the office to an upstairs study.

But the assignment of gender roles could just as easily be reversed. As the day wore on, my friend and I found ourselves locked in a gentle pas de deux, slipping in and out of rooms, yet always coming back to the grand salon, which seemed to arrest us momentarily in space. We began to appreciate the house’s elasticity, allowing for varying degrees of solitude and intimacy.

This effect was amplified by the play of light and sound. By turning on and off the various floodlights outside, you could adjust the mood of the entire house. When the lights are dimmed, for example, the house becomes less theatrical, more tender. Voices too travel through the rooms, so that you are always faintly aware of the presence of the other.

It wasn’t until we arose the next morning, however, that we fully understood Chareau’s choreography. The bathroom floor is raised in certain areas so that as we crossed it, we could catch occasional glimpses of each other before suddenly dropping back out of view.

A pair of perforated metal panels that divide the shower and bath can swing open, enabling us to chat with each other as we bathed. When they were closed, you could see the outline of a human silhouette moving behind the screen. It was the same dance we had performed around the central salon, now brought to its most intimate scale. The experience drove home how liberating the house must have felt during those first years, when it still hummed with life, with Mr. and Mrs. Dalsace circling into and out of each other’s orbit. The house was a perfect balance between the need for companionship and solitude, a utopia of the senses.

Alas, Chareau barely got to witness his greatest accomplishment. A few years after the house was completed the Germans marched into Paris, and Chareau — like the Dalsaces, a member of the city’s Jewish intellectual elite — fled. He traveled to Marseilles, then Morocco, and finally New York, where he arrived penniless and unknown.

In the mid-1940s the artist Robert Motherwell commissioned him to design a small studio house in the Hamptons. (That structure — an innovative experiment in low-cost construction that resembled a Quonset hut — was callously demolished in 1985.) Even Motherwell would later admit that, like most people in New York, he had never been fully aware of Chareau’s accomplishments.

Chareau never received another commission after that, surviving partly on what money his wife could earn giving cooking lessons to wealthy Americans. In an attempt to resurrect his reputation, he reached out in 1950 to the director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Around the same time he began negotiating with the Museum of Modern Art about a possible New York show of his work.

The Paris show never materialized. And Philip Johnson, the mercurial director of MoMA’s architecture department, who had just completed his own Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., vetoed an exhibition. By the end of 1950 Chareau was dead.

And now it is an American who has taken it upon himself to preserve the jewel of his legacy.